shell script - run list of commands - shell

Question

for i in `cat foo.txt`
do
$i
done
And I have a input file "foo.txt", with list of commands.
ls -ltr | tail
ps -ef | tail
mysql -e STATUS | grep "^Uptime"
when I run the shell script, it executes, but splits the commands in each line at spaces i.e for first line it executes only "ls", then "-ltr" for which I get command not found error.
How can I run each list as one command?
why am I doing this?
I execute lot of arbitrary shell commands including DB commands. I need to have a error handling as I execute each command(each line from foo.txt), I can't think of what can go wrong, so the idea is put all commands in order and call them in loop and check for error (#?) at each line and stop on error.

Answer 1

Why not just do this?
set -e
. ./foo.txt
set -e causes the shell script to abort if a command exits with a non-zero exit code, and . ./foo.txt executes commands from foo.txt in the current shell.
but I guess I can't send notification (email).
Sure you can. Just run the script in a subshell, and then respond to the result code:
#!/bin/sh
(
set -e
. ./foo.txt
)
if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then
echo "The world is on fire!" | mail -s 'Doom is upon us' you#youremail.com
fi

Answer 2

Code mentioned.
for i in `cat foo.txt`
do
$i
done
Please use https://www.shellcheck.net/
This will result _
$ shellcheck myscript
Line 1:
for i in `cat foo.txt`
^-- SC2148: Tips depend on target shell and yours is unknown. Add a shebang.
^-- SC2013: To read lines rather than words, pipe/redirect to a 'while read' loop.
^-- SC2006: Use $(...) notation instead of legacy backticked `...`.
Did you mean: (apply this, apply all SC2006)
for i in $(cat foo.txt)
$
Will try while loop, and for test purpose content of foo.txt mentioned below
cat foo.txt
ls -l /tmp/test
ABC
pwd
while read -r line; do $line; if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then echo "Send email Notification stating $line Command reported error "; fi; done < foo.txt
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Dec 24 11:41 test.txt
bash: ABC: command not found...
Send email Notification stating ABC Command reported error
/tmp
In case error reported you can break the loop.
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_09_05.html
while read -r line; do $line; if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then echo "Send email Notification stating $line Command reported error "; break; fi; done < foo.txt
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Dec 24 11:41 test.txt
bash: ABC: command not found...
Send email Notification stating ABC Command reported error
while read -r line; do eval $line; if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then echo "Send email Notification stating $line Command reported error "; break; fi; done < foo.txt
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Dec 24 11:41 test.txt
bash: ABC: command not found...
Send email Notification stating ABC Command reported error